(Click image to download brief.)

Key Takeaways:

• New quality combat capabilities [新质战斗力], which Xi Jinping prioritized for development in 2022, feature in many recent People’s Liberation Army (PLA) articles. Changes in warfare, technologies, and production are creating new combat capabilities. This creates the need to develop new combat capability assessment methods based on informationized and intelligent technologies, analysis of new-type operational forces, the expansion of operational domains, and the interaction of civilian production and military technological requirements. While the PLA is searching for improved methods to analyze the complexity of future operations, it appears to fail to factor in important data that could improve the accuracy of current capability assessments.
• The PLA appears to use many different assessment methods with no standard method and no uniformity of factors used to assess capabilities. Combat capability assessments are important to the PLA for supporting planning, command decisions, conducting operations, modernization, force development, and training, and the evaluation factors and missions included in capability assessments provide insight into planning, operations, and the factors the PLA considers important for successful future operations. Yet some assessments exclude important areas such as training, operational methods, officers’ professional military education level, and environmental factors. The PLA’s lack of a uniform method for assessing combat capability could lead to uneven and inaccurate assessments supporting decision-making for operations. The variation in assessment factors employed in assessments would also appear to lead to variations in accuracy between the evaluations.
• Future warfare and technological developments are creating a more complex and dynamic battlefield. This is driving PLA researchers to examine more accurate and complex methods for evaluating combat capability. The PLA increasingly seeks data-driven and qualitative features that require accurate assessment methods compared to more traditional subjective and quantitative methods.